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How an arrest in Iraq revealed ISIS's $2bn jihadist network

You would think with all the surveillance that goes on spying on us all this should not have been a surprise. How stupid are they?

Members of the Kurdish armed fighting force look out over Jalula in northern Iraq, where they have been fighting Isis. Photograph: Rick Findler

Seizure of 160 computer flash sticks revealed the inside story of Isis, the band of militants that came from nowhere with nothing to having Syrian oil fields and control of Iraq's second city

Two days before Mosul fell to the Islamic insurgent group Isis (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), Iraqi commanders stood eyeballing its most trusted messenger. The man, known within the extremist group as Abu Hajjar, had finally cracked after a fortnight of interrogation and given up the head of Isis's military council.

"He said to us, 'you don't realise what you have done'," an intelligence official recalled. "Then he said: 'Mosul will be an inferno this week'.'

Several hours later, the man he had served as a courier and been attempting to protect, Abdulrahman al-Bilawi, lay dead in his hideout near Mosul. From the home of the dead man and the captive, Iraqi forces hoovered up more than 160 computer flash sticks which contained the most detailed information yet known about the terror group.